Meaning: he did violate ethics rules!
Caveats, contingencies,technicalities…it is so obvious this man is devoid of moral character…in ANY other administration he would have been gone yesterday…in the Dons world he gets a wink and a nod…the " heck of a job Brownie" treatment.
He is circling the drain as we speak.
Shorter version:
I lied for political reasons thinking I could get away with it.
I got caught by the truth.
Never Mind
I’d like to use some Roundup on him. Surely that’s allowed under new EPA guidelines.
When an ethics official at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined last week that Administrator Scott Pruitt’s rental of a room in a lobbyist’s home did not violate ethics rules, he did not have all of the facts about Pruitt’s rental situation, a new memo obtained by CNN reveals.
This little statement kind of gets and the crux of it. There was no review, ethics or otherwise, until the story broke in the media (was leaked). Pruitt had no qualms about his great, self-serving deal which enabled more grift and graft. All the rest of this sideshow is attempts to cover up and/or cya (now it’s the ethics official’s cya for providing a Pruitt cya moment.)
“I need an ethics report that clears me. Take this very limited question about whether it violated the “gift rule,” using only the words in the lease and these incomplete facts about who I was renting from and assuming I was using the property explicitly as described in the lease, and come up with something. Nobody will ask any questions later, I promise.”
Seems to me that this career employee was either bullied by the Secretary’s office or was negligent in carrying out his job. Simply evaluating a lease does not comprise the basic information to do a complete ethics review. Did he not question the mechanics of simply using a single room peridically, e.g., can the Secretary keep his belongings at the unit when he is not there? Are there other similar leases at this property? Are there basic kitchen privileges like use of a refrigerator or microwave? I suspect the ethics officer was compromised by bullying.
According to the WaPo article, the ethics people checked prices on Craigslist and found other rooms for rent in the same price range in the same area. I doubt they did a comparison of amenities and I doubt they actually tried to find out if those rentals were real. When I was looking, the cheap ones were never actually available but others for more were.
“I was only charged with determining whether the spelling and punctuation in the lease agreement were correct.”
I agree. This whole (mal)administration is packed full of arrogance, entitled bullies.
For me the most important piece of information in the whole mess is that the Ethics guy was apparently only brought in last week. This appears to imply that nothing was done when the whole kerfuffle started after this was exposed. Question is: was there no process for this beforehand or was it ignored?? You know, like in the honking fat raises for the two clueless overpaid girls he schlepped to DC with him…
This whole thing stinks to high heaven.
Is that the new hip hop duo? Grift-N-Graft or maybe Graft-N-Grift I have trouble telling them apart
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Two words, Minoli: Due. Diligence.
Translation: I’ve been doing a shit-show poor job… but he’s the violator, not me!
In MAGALAND , he gets a shout out on twitter about how good hes doing
Only if in drinking water. Otherwise, just giving someone round up is poisoning. If in drinking water by negligence or natural run off or infiltration into wells, etc, then its ok. The word drinking with water tells you its ok.
The headline needs to cover both parts of the story. The second part is even more alarming.
Yes, they did not have all the facts (although absent being in the home to see McKenna Pruitt sleeping is a bit creepy, even for a Trump ethicist). So yeah, sure, “more facts.” This just speaks to a lack of resources and implies a lack of effort.
But the article also paraphrases Minoli as saying he himself limited the scope of his own assessment by focusing only on whether it violated “gift rules” not “impartiality” rules. There are two things to note, here.
First, any common-sense reading of the gift-rule clause shows he is wrong. The data the memo brings forth (instances of one-room domiciles costing less than $55/day around C street) demonstrates this. The EPA memo cites 7 instances of comparable cost around C street. There are 600+ instances that cost more (just run the same search in the same neighborhood). Already the deal Pruitt had was more affordable than 90% of all housing in the neighborhood. Minoli attempted to justify his finding, implying he already found Pruitt not to be out of compliance. He did a bad job.
Second, he acknowledges he did not apply a sufficient array of policies to come to his conclusion. Again, a common-sense approach to the partiality of accepting living arrangements from a lobbyist will arrive at the conclusion that Pruitt is out of compliance. Minoli demonstrates an astounding lack of understanding of the scope of his authority or of the policy instruments at his disposal.
New headline: crook lets second crook sleep in third crook’s apartment.
Of course, it’s legal to take a gun into a bank (in some jurisdictions), legal to wear a mask, and legal to run out of a bank with a bag of money. Any narrative which seeks to connect those legal actions with some spuriously negative connotation is, of course, FAKE NEWS.